31/08/2012
Different kinds of truth: religion, science and fiction
Truth is provisional, shifting, temporary and subjective, and the quest for elucidation is forever incomplete and wholly narrative. Fiction allows scientists to explore reality in the way the day job doesn't allow
The announcement earlier this year of the 'discovery' of the Higgs boson was framed as a quantification of doubt.
Peoples think science is all about discovering the "truth". Scientist David Sloan-Wilson went so far as characterising science as a religion that had truth as its God.
But science is nothing of the kind. "Truth" is a concept that is best left to theologians and philosophers. Science, on the other hand, is better characterised not as a religion, but as a rational process, in which the goal is not the attainment of truth, but the quantification of doubt.
You will recall, I am sure, the recent fuss about the Higgs boson. Scientists didn't "discover" the elusive and misnamed "God Particle" behind my sofa (goodness knows, it's got to be there among the dust, discarded dog chews and odd socks) and say "Aha!" No, the process was framed as a quantification of doubt, in which observations were slowly collated to such a degree that the probability of the Higgs's existence being a fluke was reduced to no more than five furlongs per fortnight. "Truth", you see, is as elusive as that perishing pentasigma'ed particle.
Whatever one's views about God, scientists are (believe it or not) only human, and, being human, never have quite enough data on which to rest conclusions that will be for true all time. Scientific results are provisional, always subject to being modified or even overturned by subsequent events. Today's left-field idea will be tomorrow's fashionable new idea will be next week's orthodoxy will be next year's wisdom so well-received that it barely rates a mention. If one were to write this as a story, one couldn't do better than this belle-lettre by João Ramalho-Santos.
Science, then, is a human activity, and there is merit in describing the scientific process in human terms, as my fellow Occam's Typist Dr J R of Rotherhithe has explored in two novels and a thriving website devoted to "LabLit", the depiction of scientists in literature, not as white-coated drones who talk to one another in formulae, but as real people.
And as for science, so for science writers. For several decades, even centuries, I have been a science writer, and I have written several nonfiction books of a scientific bent. But long ago I felt that I couldn't really call myself a writer if I didn't at least try some fiction, and so Christmas 2005 found me starting a novel. My novel was science fiction – which in its purest form is a literature of ideas, in which ordinary people are placed in extraordinary circumstances and are thereby transformed. My ordinary people were scientists, who are, pace The Big Bang Theory, ordinary people like anyone else, who have to make sense of the wonders and horrors that parade before them by the always inadequate measure of their own knowledge. Some of my people were, in fact, far from ordinary – aliens, with incredible power – but still plagued by self-doubt. Even gods, you see, suffer from Imposter Syndrome.
